Havana`s

TRAVEL
Havana’s infamous Hotel Nacional de Cuba has seen it all.
Countless international celebrities, the rise of the American
Mafia in Havana, Castro’s revolution and the Cold War.
This year the Havana landmark turns 80
Havana’s
Grand
Dame
STORY ROMAN GOERGEN
PHOTOS STEVEN S. MIRIC / SUPERSTOCK
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N
history. They will marvel at the portrait pictures of the
galleria, the Nacional’s own hall of fame ,where, sorted
by decade, its most prominent guests smile from the
marbled walls – Buster Keaton, Winston Churchill,
Ava Gardner, Kevin Costner, Diego Maradona, Naomi
Campbell and Errol Flynn are just a few of these faces.
Famous stories will be told, like how Johnny
Weissmuller (famed as an Olympic swimming gold
medalist and Tarzan actor) inaugurated the garden pool
WIMPIE ACKERMANN
tourbuses, being received by the stone-faced underpaid
ew Year’s Eve, 1958, Havana. The days
porters of communist Cuba, who deeply depend on the
of the Batista regime are counted, Fidel
convertible pesos spent by these Western tourists.
Castro’s revolutionary forces literally at
Even the famous 426-bed Nacional is not spared
the doorsteps of the Cuban capital. An
by this hunger for tourism money. Making our way
elegant silver-grey 1957 Chevrolet Impala convertible
to the reception, it takes a while to take in the stark
comes to a screeching halt at the main entrance gate
contrast between the Bermuda shorts of the visitors
of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. In the back seat of the
and the old grandeur that this building still breathes.
car sits a nervous man – Meyer Lansky, kingpin of the
The hotel looks like a palace in the way it majestically
American Mafia in Cuba. Lansky’s concern: get as
perches on a rock,
much of the Mafia money as possible out of Cuba before
overlooking the skyline
the communist mob storms the casinos. Millions
of Havana. Designed by
are at stake. Lansky’s brand-new casino, The Habana
the American architect
Riviera, made US$3-million in its first season, and the
bureau McKim, Mead
three-year-old casino of the Nacional is doing equally
& White in the 1920s,
well: the money is burning in the pockets of the mob
it displays neo-Moorish
financier. He tells his Cuban driver, Armando Jaime
styles, dashes of art
Casielles, on that evening: ‘We’ve got to make the
deco and neoclassical
rounds to all the casinos. We’ve got to make sure the
counting rooms are secure,
that the money is secure. You
know, the island is going to
fall. It could get violent. It
could get heated, and we have
to protect our assets.’
Flash-forward 52 years
and an air-conditioned
tour bus with the bright
omnipresent logo of Cuba’s
tourism agency Havanatur
stops at the same spot at the
roundabout in front of the
Nacional as Lansky’s car
did so many years earlier.
On board, guide Ricardo
explains the significance of
the building: ‘This is where
the American Mafia met
and made their decisions on
how to operate in Cuba.’ He
has his information from a
first-hand source. After the
victory of the revolution,
The Hotel Nacional has not only played
Lansky’s driver Casielles
host to visiting dignitaries, statesmen and
wrote The Secret Life of Meyer
celebrities, it also witnessed a clandestine
Lansky in Havana, relaying
chauffeur-driven getaway by a Mafia
his experience as a chauffeur
kingpin desperate to keep casino millions
of the Mafia: ‘The gigantic
away from Castro’s revolutionary forces.
projects of gaming, drugs
elements like its prominent twin towers. The reception
and sex; channels of heroin to the United States, and
hall and its surroundings resemble the cloisters of a
cocaine powder for the consumption of thousands
cathedral, and, thanks to an expensive US$64-million
of American tourists who visited the wildest spots in
restoration in 1992, every building material is the finest:
Havana... were condemned to disappear as soon as
Carrara marble, Seville tiles and tropical cedar wood.
Batista’s tyranny fell apart.’
The grand dame of hotels still has her style and is ready
Gone are Lansky and the American suits and
for her 80th birthday on 30 December 2010. On that
costumes of the decadent ‘50s; instead, sandal-clad
occasion, Cubans and international celebrities will
British and Canadian tourists, coming from the
once again look back fondly at the hotel’s intriguing
all-inclusive resorts of Varadero or Holquin, leave the
during the hotel opening
at the peak of the global
depression in 1930 with
a jump straight out of his
room window. Or how a
group of aristocratic Cuban
army officers barricaded
themselves in the hotel
during their uprising against
dictator Batista in 1933.
‘When the Nacional
opened in 1930, the
society reporters of the
local tabloids had to work
for days,’ Cuban historian
Estela Rivas Vazquez
likes to say when she gives
tourists a tour of the hotel
several times a week. It
feels like the ghosts of these
glorious days still roam the
halls of the Nacional – and,
if you believe British actor Jude Law, quite literally. Law
visited the Nacional during Christmas 2007 with his exwife, Sadie Frost, and their children. According to Law’s
own account of events, he surprised Frank Sinatra’s
ghost while raiding the room’s mini-bar. Even though
believers said that the actor didn’t know that he stayed
in the singer’s former suite, sceptics point towards the
extensive sampling of vintage Cuban rum and Cohiba
cigars that Law engaged in before the ‘encounter’.
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TRAVEL
Ghosts or no ghosts, it requires neither the vivid
imagination of an intoxicated Hollywood actor nor
a paranormal event to picture Frank Sinatra relaxing
with his wife Ava Gardner on the lounge chairs of the
hotel garden during their honeymoon in 1951. A glass
of Mojito from the outdoor bar in hand, we find the part
of the hotel park that Sinatra and Gardner particularly
cherished, a spot on the hill which overlooks the
Malecon, Havana’s oceanfront promenade. And while
an electrical storm blows over the city’s skyline, all that
is missing is Franky Blue Eyes singing ‘In the wee small
hours of the morning’.
But the Nacional is not only the right place to
reminisce about the romantic Frank Sinatra, it’s also
an important road marker when it comes to the singer's
Mafia connections. Sinatra started visiting Cuba in
1946 on the invitation of prominent mobsters living
in exile there, including Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano,
the Fischetti brothers and, of course, Meyer Lansky
himself. On 20 December 1946, a Sinatra concert at the
Nacional served as cover for one of the most important
events in the history of the American Mafia – a meeting
so important that it even got immortalised in a scene
of Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather II. Jewish mobster
Hyman Roth, a character based
on the real-life Meyer Lansky,
is having a birthday party in his
hotel suite in Havana. ‘These
are wonderful things that we’ve
achieved in Havana, and there’s
no limit to where we can go from
here. This kind of government
knows how to help business, to
encourage it. The hotels here are
bigger and swankier than any of
the rub joints we've put in Vegas,
and we can thank our friends in
the Cuban government, which
has put up half of the cash, with
the Teamsters, on a dollar-for-dollar basis; has relaxed
restrictions on imports,’ Roth boasts.
These lines may be from the Godfather script, but
every word in it is true and could have been spoken by
Lansky at the famous Mafia conference of ’46 at the
Nacional. Not less than 500 mob leaders took hold of
the suites of the hotel, which was closed to ordinary
guests during that week. It was the biggest and most
important conference of these underworld leaders since
the notorious Chicago meeting in 1932. Alibi provider
Frank Sinatra arrived with two cousins of Al Capone and
two golden cigarette boxes for the guest of honour, Lucky
Luciano, who was about to be crowned the king of the
Mafia’s international operations with his headquarters
in Havana. At this conference at the Nacional, mobster
banker Meyer Lansky shared with his partners a dark
vision for Havana. The city was about to become a
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Latin Vegas, a place ruled by drug trade, gambling,
prostitution, labour racketeering and extortion.
Lansky’s vision quickly became a reality. Casinos,
hotels and nightclubs sprouted like mushrooms in
Havana after the ’46 conference with the Nacional itself
getting its own casino in 1955, inaugurated with a grand
gala featuring Eartha Kitt. Around 20 percent of the
profits were used to finance the Batista dictatorship. By
the ‘50s Havana was teeming with American tourists
staying in the mob hotels like the Nacional, gambling,
dancing the mambo, watching sex shows and visiting
brothels. Some 80 flights from the United States landed
at Havana airport every day. Pan American Airlines,
which had a controlling interest in the Nacional, offered
round-trip tickets from Miami to Havana for US$39,
promising ‘an international swirl of race, language and
social class’.
‘A flood of tourists, mostly from North America
and from Europe, came to Havana, seeing it as one of
the great entertainment scenes throughout history
in a way because it really was a confluence of a kind of
entertainment and a sort of slightly dangerous feel to
it, particularly as the revolution began to unfold,’ said
TJ English, author of the book Havana Nocturne: How
the Mob Owned Cuba, Then Lost it to the Revolution in a
radio interview.
It is this decadence and exploitation of Cuba that
fuelled the Castro revolution. They watched how the
American Mafia teamed up with legit corporations
like the Hilton Group or Pan Am and split up the
spoils of Cuba. To communist propaganda, it was the
perfect proof of how evil capitalism really is. According
to English, this era defines the American-Cuban
relationship to this day: the deep resentment and
hatred. ‘This has been used over the many decades,
by Castro and others within the revolution, as a kind
of a call to arms, a reason why we could never trust
the United States government because of its criminal
connections and criminal roots,’ explains English.
So when the revolutionaries stormed the Nacional
and the other mob hotels in 1959 and closed the
casinos not much later, they removed the symbols of
the hated lifestyle that brought their movement into
being. The mob realised that they would never be able
to buy Castro – so the Mafiosi put their profits into
big suitcases and fled the country. It was the end of
an era. Only once after that did the Nacional make
international headlines when, during the missile crisis
of 1962, the Cuban army moved its head command into
a cave underneath the hotel.
The Nacional fell into a deep slumber from
which it only awoke with the restoration in 1992. The
communist government had lost its financier, the
Soviet Union, and was in desperate need of tourism
money. Good news for the hotel, which experienced
a resurrection. And even though the glorious days for
the grand old dame of Havana's skyline may be over,
there is hope for better times, at least from an economic
perspective. US president Barack Obama has said that
he wants a ‘new beginning’ with Cuba and, already,
tour operators prepare for the return of millions of
Americans to the island.
Will there be a new craze of sex, crime and
indulgence? At least some travel experts believe so, and
say that now is the best time to visit Havana… ‘before
the Yankees return’. And why not stay in the place that
has become a symbol of Havana's history like no other?
The Hotel Nacional de Cuba.
hotelnacionaldecuba.com
Toronto-based Roman Goergen, 39, has worked as a
journalist in Europe, South Africa and North America.
He recently visited Havana and south-eastern Cuba.